I was hoping to avoid having to reinstal and reformat. I will work on this the next couple of days and see if I can avoid having to reformat the hard drive. I've gotten a lot of stuff cleared out using spyware doctor, but it still hasn't gotten all of it. I will download the free software and see if it works. If not, I'll dump it all and start clean. This cpu currently has windows98. Will those programs work well with this os or should I really look seriously into upgrading to xp?